Posts Tagged ‘art’

Politics for this songwriter is an ugly mouthful of a word. It has no poetry, no beauty, no connotation other than that which it is. To use the word politics in song is to usher in hate and fix the song to it. Politics inspires not love but mistrust. We have been sold to it, not convinced by it.

This film is a beautiful little reminder of just how wonderful humanity can be.

Modern music is boring! I am scared by its banality, by its reason to exist. The media have stolen its honesty and made it superficial, made it irrelevant and left us hungry and short changed. Music has been rendered a slogan, an empty gesture, a sound bite indeed; it is dressed up without substance, it is superficially bang tidy. Today music is being engineered without passion; it treads a bland monotonous path as if all that paved the way to this moment has been no more than a wasted passage of time. Yet the musical collective of this world is enormous, varied, vibrant, exciting, intelligent, life inducing and wild; and so filled with love and humanity that it burns with the self same light that once filled our greatest musical journeys.

So if music is still alive out there, grinding with youthful, inventive, uncontrollable verve, why is it so dull? Switch on your radio and receive a snapshot of today’s musical poverty, fit only for mainstream turned down minds. They are promoting what will sell, regardless of its worth. The multi-million sellers today have stood on the shoulders of greatness and passed it off as their own and we continue to be fooled that sales is a sign of worth. But it is not! It is like judging the happiness of a family by the price of the house in which they live. It is all a farce; as is the positions of the charts or the best sellers list, they are just slots paid for by the record and publishing companies, to make you believe what it is you are buying is approved.

Music doesn’t care what you look like, even if you care what it looks like, music, it is no better for rich mans ears than for the poor. The more perfect the voice, the less it usually has to say! If you listen to music through bad headphones, you never get to know how beautiful it really sounds. At the same time if you only listen to what they want you to buy you will never learn of music’s utter sublimity, you will remain deaf to how rich this thing can really be. Modern music has become a manufactured commodity; pop stars are just the peddlers of snake oil.

But defiant change is coming. Where our creativity is not blighted by the record corporation. I hear it now. Music is alive and inventive in cafes and clubs, on street corners and rooftops, online, deep in your hearts; in your head, on your lips, in the harmony and disharmony of lives and loves. Our musical presence is alive; it lives for us on the curves of her rhythm and the gravel of her voice. Let it be invented in bedrooms, in prison yards, with attitude and reason, released by those in love with music not money, make it without time signatures, dream it, live it, bend it and break it, offend god, don’t apologize, turn it up, record the cry of freedom and love, screw the control of commercialism, bang stuff, scream, sing, damn your soul and condemn your body to let your music be! Music really can set you free!

Make music, make new music, don’t allow the shallow marketers to robe you of your musical heritage or more importantly our musical future. Lose the label. Find the rebel. Lose the genre. Be free, not instructed nor frustrated. Let your prejudice go. Learn how to hear it again, listen to it all and throw the whole world at it.

It is always hard for me to believe that we go to war. It is even harder to believe that we accept it so readily, that we are convinced so easily of the mandate of war. Are we informed, do we care? Do we stand on the right side? Who do you choose to believe? Do we know the circumstance, the timeline, the pipeline, the truth behind the fact? The price of life. The meaning behind the headlines, the stink behind the bullshit. Do we remember the Resolution that damned both sides to war? Religion, money or prejudice; which suited your mind? Is it an act of humanity or terror? Did we hear their side in reason and think accordingly? Did you see the movie or the documentary? Do you believe Mr President, the anchorman, the prime minister, the soldier, the doctor, the industry or do you trust a politician? But we do remember those “Weapons of Mass Destruction” don’t we? And behold, war harnesses the power of advertising.

The greedy generation wears “What Can I Do?” sprayed across hipster tight t-shirts. Where is their fight, the stomping, the graffiti; where is their primal urge to rebel? But their acceptance has been sold to them on every device, on every campaign of sale, on every pitch upon this new cathartic life. Social media has controlled us to conform within its polite, political parameters. We can speak to the world now, but only in courteous, accepted tones. LOL. Music, once the gauge of youth rebellion, the temperature of the soul is now lost. It has disappeared from campuses, is non-existent on itunes, empty from the music papers. It is becoming more and more Eurovision and less the temperament of defiance. Music companies, too concerned by sales in a changing market to rock the boat, too polite to sign up a reaction. Music has become a commodity and is no longer a revolution. I spit blood to this! Music has become bland, more sterile than I ever dared believe. The charts are a sham, they tell you what they want you to buy. It has been rounded, perfumed and cauterized of all expression. But this is not the order of the world changing; this is not evolution, this is not the free spirit of young people. This is control.

But it isn’t our involvement with war that frightens me most, it is in our simple act of acceptance. Shall we honestly not care that we kill our own kind? Today we accept the killing of innocent people and make those that carry out such crimes heroes; I shudder at the advertising connotations of this. Look out, we are being sold a war and we believe it. Governments know this.

I say bring on the hackers, the bloggers, the terrorists of convention, a class of redemption, the musician, the artist, writers, the iconoclasts and allow them to give us back our voice. Turn off the television people; it will have you dull and programmed. We have more power collectively, than sedative control allows you to believe! An easy life is a cowards life, and it shall reap its rewards in pointless, cowardly ways.

In the last one hundred and fifty years of our magnificent intelligence, we have been responsible for the most unbelievable leaps foreward for our kind in recorded history. The computer, medicine, philosophy, science, arts, design, communication, aeronautics, stratospheric’s; people are more enlightened, dreams are now even possible; the canon of our worth is now almost unimaginable. And as much as the false leaders all want to take the credit for these creations, it is has nothing to do with a single one of them; but they can make speeches on it.

The world is a fundamentally different place than it was before the Great War; you remember the one that millions of innocent people got shot in. Today sees just another leader, another effigy, another fool on the hill; but we’ve seen it all before, it’s all the same, new logo: same design. Don’t let them hold us back, don’t let politics or religion stifle or take the credit for our unrivaled prowess! Mankind stood on the moon, not a nation, not a religion not a political party.

Today’s governments are at the forefound of nothing, preaching to an old world on out-moded media; on televisions, in radio friendly, bible belt words, spelled out in yesterdays Times, with pseudo-leaked reports, in the sound bites of bullshit. But the Internet generation shall succeed politics and religion. It follows a different command; its very design is of the order of progress. It is very difficult for the email generation to believe in holy water, as it is difficult for the YouTube generation to believe in party political broadcasts. Today the computer age owns the world. The young are in control, and if you don’t believe me, you just try and ignore them!

So how are the dinosaurs that control us doing today? We grow enough food to feed the world but half of its people are starving. We march for peace but the world is at war. They shore up flood and famine until such time as we can excuse ourselves of blame. The people have faught to take back a freedom that had been promised for so long that we no longer know what it is, instead we now settle on a new form of freedom; today freedom is adjusted by the amount you get paid. The markets have spread poverty and ignorance further and further and shared the wealth and influence with itself. Gods political wing is not uniting the people but ironically pushing mankind further and further apart. All over the world women are still fighting to take back the rights they deserve. In a post-racial world why is racism rising? Human rights, poverty, welfare, justice, hatred, torture, land mines, the death penalty and the thirsty refugees. Just because you believe what you are being told, don’t make it right!

But humankind is a believer, a follower en masse, a pack animal; seldom an individual. We want to believe in God even if we don’t. We belong to politics but who really trusts them? Religions eventually become mythology and politics are eventually overcome by revolution. But what frightens me most, is what it is we are willing to believe.

From the earth came Mankind. From his inability to control himself came God, from the love of his own design came Kings and Emperors and from our social indifference came politics. It appears that each significant form of control takes less and less time to fall. Stand up!

Just let me be. Leave me alone to write my music: to write my blog and to be in love. Leave me to intervene with my own bucktoothed philosophy: to be inventive and foolish and to find expression in the low bow of trees and in the reluctant corners of eyes. I had begun to use the words that nobody spoke of; the ideas that nobody came with. Those that knew me disowned me and crossed the street, and those not of my acquaintance hung down their heads and let me in. As time passed I told the truth as I saw it and eventually nobody but my love came to my door. So now I hide in the cleft of music that resonates beneath words. To find that which should not be said, and say it first. There is of course considerable juicy pleasure in scratching your ass, but very few would like it recommended at table. We are all born stupid. Written on the wall of my studio it states ‘In this room I am free’. People have commented poorly on this but it is true. Freedom is that which you do alone, it is individual at its source. Do not confuse loneliness with being alone; they are not the same thing. Being in love and being alone; now, this feeds the artist where they are their hungriest. So I drift into the opportunities that guitars have to offer, the voices obtainable from my piano and the words in my head that stitch these things together. And she brings me rice noodles and fish when I become famished. This is the view from my room and it is universal.

There is one unifying factor that binds nation to nation and people to people. You can hear the answer in the street, on the voices that spill from downtown kitchens; you can feel it in the yearning for individuality in every crowd that surges together; it is in the distance, and it is also inside your heart. What is it we all crave but can never receive enough? You can feel it profoundly in the ugly, you can see it if you examine your own image, in bikinis and in suits, in porno, the baby, the lover, the lonely; it sprouts from the teenagers loudly willing to be heard, to the voices of nightlife saying come and get me; it rises from cigarettes and coffee like quality French girls; it is in prohibition, in censorship, in the elevator chatter on the fourteenth floor, to the subterranean rumbling behind locked toilet doors, from pimps to pushers to pullers; from all of hospitality to philosophy, in music, in violence, in lipstick, in humor, in the denouncement of god. And no it is not sex! This thing we crave shines for a light when we already have one, it’s in the taxis, the paperboy, and in our dreams, it rises in the hush of longing, from the edge of the tightrope, at the lip of the cliff, in funny and in tattoos, in the lost and in the found, in painting and at temple. It can be transmitted through our five senses, through sight, sound and touch, and increasingly provocatively through scent and taste. The flow of our world is identified upon the self same thing. Everything we do we do for attention. Read it again.

But our need for attention in the modern era has gone berserk. The superficial has never been so seriously taken. Our children’s desire for fame is to be recognized not for what they can do but out of a desperate need to be loved, loved not for what they are but what they want to be. Fame has superseded the product it peddles. Will we ever match the attention we crave? How much do we need, how much will it cost and what are you prepared to pay for it with? How much is too much? Are we all just setting out our meds readied for disappointment and depression? But what is the cause of our junky obsession with attention? Is it our parents, is it femininity, masculinity, is it money to buy a boat and a sack of cocaine to bring on better quality attention, is it in your subscribers, your re-tweets, is it the fear of loneliness, is it the longing of acceptance, is it to be idolized, fantasized, recognized, close your eyes and smile that you made it all the way to notoriety? Is it the shallow mark of modern validation? Is it only a publicity tool that the marketing strategists exploit? Or is it real? But only those of justified attention shall know what it really means. Your life is yours for the giving away!